The plan had worked, in its narrow, humiliating way. A little rambling about a provincial inspector, a little talk of grain wagons no one could trace, and the officers had stopped seeing a suspect and started seeing a madman — which was, for the moment, the safer thing to be. It had bought him a crowded cell instead of an interrogation room, and he had spent it learning a new kind of restraint: watching a cellmate take his food and saying nothing, because a man building a reputation for harmlessness doesn’t fight for scraps.
Then the dizziness came, the same undertow that had pulled him out of his own life before, and the cell around him began to lose its edges.
He had no way to choose where it left him next, or in what state, or how much time would have passed for the body he was leaving behind in that cell. The last time this had happened, he had woken to blood on his knuckles and no memory of the hour that made him a suspect. There was no reason to expect gentler terms this time.
Whatever waited on the other side of that pull, he wouldn’t get to prepare for it.
Chapter Fifteen of Tales of Alive — 纪真然 arrives Sunday, August 23.
The Slick and the Silent
About this chapter
Chapter Fifteen finds Lü Yueguang carried once more into a life he doesn’t get to steer, at a moment neither of his two selves chose. The Slick and the Silent is a chapter about the space between what a man can see coming and what he’s actually allowed to stop — the difference between understanding a danger and having any power over it. It asks what a historian’s foresight is worth to a man who can’t yet act on what he knows.
About Tales of Alive
Tales of Alive — 纪真然 is a historical novel by 吕恩豪, set between contemporary Shenzhen and Han Dynasty China. Book One follows a man trained to read the past who finds himself forced to live inside it. New chapters publish every Sunday on WebNovel and Royal Road. Every court session, every meal, every execution has a source. What the author cannot prove is marked clearly. The rest, they will stand behind.
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- Chapter One — The Weight of Plastic and Dust
- Chapter Two — The Vessel of Wrath
- Chapter Three — The Weight of the Bargain
- Chapter Four — The Echo of the Breaking
- Chapter Five — The Bureaucrat’s Halberd
- Chapter Six — The Long March
- Chapter Seven — The River of Rot
- Chapter Eight — The Shards of Home
- Chapter Nine — The Ghost in the Glass
- Chapter Ten — The Dangerous Bargain
- Chapter Eleven — The Shadow on the Road
- Chapter Twelve — The Ink and the Ache
- Chapter Thirteen — The Awakening of the Beast
- Chapter Fourteen — The Madman’s Map
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